Now more than ever, corporate compliance, audit and governance issues must be efficiently resolved. Yet it is widely believed that less than half of large companies have a formal data stewardship or data quality program that protects and leverages their unique strategic asset of data. Smart businesses are proactive, not reactive they comprehend the business need for quality data. Aside from compliance and governance agendas, having first-class data and the ability to unlock it- significantly helps all aspects of your organization s business - helping to effectively gauge and manage risk, avoid redundant work loads, increase customer satisfaction on the front and back ends- and provide for better business intelligence and decision making support. Conversely, poor data quality will have injurious consequences across all enterprise operations - negatively impacting the most critical customer service obligations such as billing and remittance processing-, skewing decisions and fulfillment obligations, and creating a host of other tactical problems. Numerous hidden business costs such as revenue leakage and higher capital expenditures may all be maladies that stem from lack of data integrity. While there are tools that can help with and augment your formal methodology, capable data stewardship requires the symbiotic merging and integration of the automated technology- with the manual people-. For many organizations, data problems remain secreted or hidden until issues are uncovered that result from a formidable event of costly business impact, such as an external audit, fraudulent activity, subpoena or valued customer satisfaction issue. A prolific variety of complex legacy data which may go through many iterations of manual reconciliation on its way up to senior management s eyes- lingering in cloaked and siloed structures will always be poised to wreak havoc when least expected. Today, with the advent of widespread Internet and e-commerce applications, the data problems of an enterprise can be exposed to the entire consumer world. If you have bad data on your customers e.g., not recognizing them across accounts-, they will know - often long before you catch on. The time to establish a formal data stewardship program is now! Source and full article: www.dmreview.coma>